John Tateishi
Japanese American author, historian
John Tateishi (born 1939) is the former redress director of the Japanese American Citizens League and was a key figure in the campaign for reparations for the Internment of Japanese Americans. He wrote Redress: the Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations.
Life
Tateishi was born on August 21, 1939 in Lawndale in Los Angeles, California. Tateishi was two at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, and the federal government forced his family to move to the Manzanar detention center for the duration of the war as part of the enforcement of Executive Order 9066. Tateishi was pivotal in the redress campaign that began in 1978.
At University of California, Berkeley he studied English literature followed by a graduate program at University of California, Davis. He taught at the City College of San Francisco and became involved with the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in 1975.
In 1978, he became the chair of the National Committee for Redress and helped guide the campaign. He resigned from the city college in 1981 to fully focus on the campaign, and served as the campaign's principal lobbyist. Tateishi left the campaign two years before the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “John Tateishi” is japanese American author, historian. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through John, Tateishi and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q111522951. VIAF identifies the subject as 247496667. The Library of Congress control number is n83161922. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1978, 1975 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Tateishi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.